coming from denver despite the logistic difficult created by hurricane sandy. the biggest challenge. >> there was no challenge coming in from denver 68 and sunny. [laughter] it's been like that for the last couple of weeks. i don't know what the fuss is. [laughter] no, let me say what a pleasure it is to back hire and thank you so much for putting this together. as i'm looking out in the audience here, i see a lot of people i worked with during the days, and, you know, as we talk about the sort of onerous and times odious job of assistant secretary, one thing that made it a lot of better, you had extremely talented people to work with, and those are people that made the job easier and in fact made the job enjoyable at times. the other thing that makes the job easier is that i think our president has secretary of state have taken the position very seriously and put good anemia it. when you become the assistant secretary chances are pretty good that you're you have a good predecessor there. i had jim kelly who had done a lot of work to set things up. and to get t